Chain Immigration in Southern Bingham County
The movement from Cache Valley to Tilden
10/14/20262 min read
Pictured: Judge Charles Hart
Those opposed to immigration often cite 'chain migration' as a deciding factor swaying their opinion. The notion can be vulgarly summarized as 'if you let one in, more will come.' The concept certainly held in the area of Bingham County from lower Thomas to the Springfield area in the early twentieth century, for it seemed Utahns from Logan swarmed in along the Snake River. There was the Rich family of course, its patriarch Charles the namesake of Rich County in northern Utah. His many sons (he had 56 children with many wives) filed on land from Gold Point (upstream from what is now Tilden Bridge) to Thorn Springs (below what is now Tilden Bridge) and a granddaughter filed on the other side of the river (where the Bridge now reaches the Reservation). Ida Mae Sanford, Loganite Jacob Scharbrough's second wife (divorce was relatively easy to get in Utah compared to other states), had filed on land just west of Rich's land, on what is now Caldwell Lane. The attached photos show a house older Pingreeites might remember.
If you followed the river southwesterly you'd have come to Scharbrough's place, which extended to what is now White's Landing (once a workable boat dock until the Snake altered its course a couple decades ago). Immediately adjoining Scharbrough's place to the west, Cache County District Judge Charles Hart (pictured—he was also a member in the LDS Quorum of Seventy) claimed a large acreage from the Snake to what is now Shelman Road to the north (that road didn't exist then). Hart's family would be instrumental, despite failing, in the construction of the Oneida Canal on the Bear River, and his brother Arthur would be a well-known polygamist, a latecomer to that particular habit.
Skip one parcel of ground and you have another Loganite's early land claim. Guy Pyle's wife Annie Thompson filed on what was for decades called Dippel Springs, a small lake once public but now private and may be called something else. Next up, directly west, was Logan resident Thomas Chandler (pictured), whose wife birthed nineteen children. Their land encompassed the area near the head of McTucker Creek—that spring's first fifty feet arose on Pyle's ground but was covered over by a farmer in the late 1970s. Landon Rich's (another Charles Rich descendant) acreage wouldn't be much further away—roughly a mile west.
G.L. Braley of the Grove City Real estate company may have had something to do with the plethora of Loganite moves. in 1908 he was pushing sales of Blackfoot and Tilden area lands, the Logan Republican reporting (facetiously) that Braley claimed the land would "grow brownstone fronts if the gravel is but watered." Braley had other ventures, including a gold mine attempt—the Intermountain Placer Mining Company—and a stint as a a game warden and directorship of the Whitney Reservoir and Ditch Company south of Franklin, Idaho.
So, yes, you let one in and more will come.
